quentin tarantino’s fans have had a candle in the window for _Inglourious Basterds _ever since he started bragging up his ballsy script for the ultimate World War II action saga a decade ago. That’s why I figure I’d better break the news without delay: It isn’t the nonstop splatterfest adrenaline addicts were panting for. Anyone hoping to see _Kill Bill’_s blood ballets retooled for tommy guns is in for a serious case of, let’s say, delayed gratification.

If the trailers do their best to peddle Brad Pitt blasting his way through The Dirty Dozen, Part Deux, don’t blame Harvey Weinstein and Universal for trying. Whatever they thought they’d be getting for their reported $70 million, it wasn’t the _Moulin Rouge! _of war movies. By which I mean one set in Nazi-occupied Europe at pretty much the level that Puccini’s Tosca takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. One crammed to the gills with elaborate palaver in subtitled French and German. One that builds to a plot to kill Hitler that plays out like The Wizard of Oz transposed to the Third Reich and rewritten by Tennessee Williams on a binge.

The difference is that I wouldn’t sit through _Moulin Rouge! _again if Baz Luhrmann was threatening to drop a kitchen sink on me. A movie that brings this one’s grand nerve to reinventing the twentieth century’s most cathartic imagery is a whole different kettle of swastikas. Truth is, I’m so smitten with What Quentin Hath Wrought that if I could lug just one Tarantino title to a desert island, _Inglourious Basterds _would be it. Still, it’s only fair to warn you that I might as well be there already, so far as the conventional wisdom goes.

what naysayers and enthusiasts can agree on is the movie’s refusal to play by any rules except QuentinWorld’s. This thing’s proud excesses make everything Tarantino’s done up to now—which hasn’t exactly been timid, from Reservoir Dogs on—look like the work of a filmmaker trying to conciliate America’s multiplers by keeping his nutso side on bread and water.

Unless the deliberately misspelled title counts, the first hint that_ Inglourious Basterds _isn’t your grandpa’s wartime Europe is the opening music, a blast from the wrong past: It’s the ballad that haunts John Wayne’s not-so-great epic _The Alamo. _Next comes an opening sequence as showy as anything in Tarantino’s filmography. To the suddenly unnerving plinks of “Für Elise,” Beethoven’s malicious gift to piano beginners, S.S. Colonel Landa—nicknamed the Jew Hunter and played by a terrific Austrian actor named Christoph Waltz—pulls up with his goons at a simple French farmhouse Paul Bunyan could raise Babe in.

All smiles and polylingual quips, he’s here to interrogate Oncle Henri and Tante Em about the Jewish Dorothy hiding along with some rels in the suffocating crawl space beneath Landa’s boots. While the overscaled staging is pure Sergio Leone, the tension is right out of Hitchcock. Since we know the interview can only end in a massacre, Tarantino has leisure to fetishize every detail of Landa’s self-amused gamesmanship and his human prey’s mute terror under the floorboards—and brother, can he fetishize. When the raid’s bloodied lone survivor, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), takes o across the fields, Landa watches her go with a smile. As surely as if he’s been tipped o that he’s in a Tarantino movie, he knows they’ll meet again.

Cut to Pitt’s languidly psycho Lieutenant Aldo Raine and his Basterds, eight Jewish-American GIs recruited to wreak havoc behind enemy lines. But even though Tarantino has touted IB forever as his “guys-on-a-mission movie,” don’t worry about getting this bunch’s faces straight: They don’t rate much more screen time than the cheese baiting a mousetrap in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Something like half the squad vanish after their big set-piece scene—the chortling aftermath, mind you, of a Kraut-killing spree we don’t witness.

When we rejoin Shosanna in Paris, she’s calling herself Emmanuelle—a double entendre so complicated you’d need a rabbi into 1970s porn to explain it—and running a rep cinema under the occupiers’ noses. The one that’s soon sniffing her marquee belongs to Daniel Brühl as Zoller, who turns out to be, as he explains, “the German Sergeant York.” (Color me impressed: How many moviegoers today have heard of the American one?) Lionized for his feats as a sniper, Zoller is now aiming to turn matinee idol by reenacting his exploits in a Naziï¬¿ed ur-infomercial for battlefield sadism called Nation’s Pride.

Putting his new clout to use, he gets Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth, exuding rancid bonhomie like a fart made of champagne) to stage its premiere at Shosanna’s theater. Der Führer will be attending in person, and if you can see how this might give our gal ideas, bingo. But she’s not the only one, since London soon dispatches Michael Fassbender as dashing Lieutenant Archie Hicox—briefed by none other than Mike Myers as a crusty general while a scowling Winston Churchill (Rod Taylor) looks on—to link up with the Basterds for their own crack at bringing down the Third Reich. Their contact is Diane Kruger as the wondrously named Bridget von Hammersmark, a Marlene Dietrich–y movie star-—with a big injection of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon—who’s a Goebbels favorite but secretly helping our side. What tells you everything about Bridget and a lot about her creator is that her leg cast once she’s wounded is high-heeled.

Set in a basement dive called La Louisiane, the disastrous rendezvous between Bridget, Archie, and two of Aldo Raine’s men is a sequence sure to keep film classes dazzled for decades. Don’t think Tarantino didn’t plan it to be, either: We’re talking twenty-plus jaw-dropping minutes of edgy chitchat, multiplying agendas, and increasing jitters before the slipup that triggers an outburst of gunplay. In a final flourish, when Raine checks out the climactic carnage, Tarantino underlines his own theatricality by largely reducing Pitt to an offstage voice. And since Angelina’s better half is only in the movie for something like forty minutes as it is, chalk up yet another reason you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that these days Harvey Weinstein’s blood pressure is being monitored by NASA.

it ought to go without saying that Tarantino’s characters are strictly unbelievable as human beings. Magnified to the mythic max, they’re the L. Frank Baum versions of 1939–45: the Plucky French Jewess, the Suave Nazi Monster, the Caustic Kraut Sexpot, the Erudite British Commando, and the other stalwart fixtures of a bazillion Gott in Himmel comic books. But the movie’s preposterousness is its poetry. Most operas are preposterous, too—kind of by definition, which must be why devotees never stop blathering about being transported—and you’re a hell of a lot less likely to doze off at this one.

Tripping up our expectations, Pitt’s role as the Gung Ho Yank Sociopath on the Side of the Angels is the most openly buffoonish caricature of all. Though it’ll win bigger laughs in Paree than in Iowa, the way he and the other American characters get demoted to bungling interlopers in an all-European feud is one of Tarantino’s more sophisticated jokes—take that, Steven Spielberg—and historically astute to boot. Clearly glad to oblige, Pitt is uncommonly focused and funny. Not only is his Tennessee drawl a hoot, but the kind of old-fashioned confidence he’s acquired in his forties makes it hard to remember how blankly puzzled about a movie star’s duties he could seem in his younger days.

Good as he is, though, he can’t compete with Waltz’s Landa, who inevitably resurfaces in Paris and ends up being just full of surprises. Impossibly witty, utterly vicious, and insanely entertaining, Landa is a conception as over-the-top as Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Despite the movie’s unecstatic press reception at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where the yawnoscenti mostly came out scratching their berets, Waltz won the acting prize there; while you may worry he’s ruined himself forever for nonparodic parts, his performance is a stunner. Kruger, Laurent, and Fassbender—whose roles aren’t any less exaggerated, just less twisted—are all spot-on, too.

Only an American could magnify these faux-European archetypes into yesteryear’s X-Men, which is more or less how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly saw our own Civil War. Yet Tarantino goes further by treating Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke) and his real-life henchmen as grist for his fever dream’s mill. From Adolf’s Roman-emperor red cloak on down, they aren’t historical facsimiles any more than Dietrich was as Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress. They’re the rotten gargoyles of our most primitive childhood conjectures, and not so very different from Chaplin’s burlesque editions in 1940’s The Great Dictator.

Then again, Chaplin didn’t call Hitler Hitler—or know about Auschwitz, either. Tarantino does, which is why it’s legit to be appalled at his irresponsibility. To be honest, I wouldn’t want to attend this film with a Holocaust survivor, but is that even a sensible yardstick? I bristled when _Saving Private Ryan _messed with the facts of D-day while purporting to show the unvarnished truth. But Tarantino has always been the anti-Spielberg—pop as riotous id, not pop as superego—and his movie doesn’t pretend to portray the “real” World War II. It’s a love song to the florid, melodramatic version enshrined in his generation’s trash-culture memories, all leering villainy, tawdry glamour, and righteous rat-a-tat-tat. While I won’t give away the full outrageousness of his fabulously multilayered climax once he gets everyone into Shosanna’s theater for Nation’s Pride’s premiere, suffice it to say his characters—“Hitler” and “Goebbels” included—fulfill their destinies with a flamboyance Puccini wouldn’t sneeze at.

Anyway, whether his wow finish is way tasteless depends on your point of view. When the Nazi era was a lot more recent, Mel Brooks thumbed his nose at Hitler by making him the ultimate butt of vaudeville humor. Tarantino’s pulp fantasy is a cinemaniac’s version of the same comeuppance, and it’s no accident that the fiery finale occurs in a movie theater. More than anything else, this is his most rapturous movie about movies: movies as lingua franca, movies as a mythic past whose marvels trump the authentic one. Gallant Archie Hicox’s civilian occupation—“I’m a film critic”—is the joke that tips Inglourious Basterds into dementia. But the whole thing is set in a Netflix junkie’s self-enclosed universe, right down to the way Aldo Raine’s shoulder patch gives him a Hollywood pedigree; his former outfit is the WWII cutthroat crew immortalized in 1968’s robustly cheesy The Devil’s Brigade.

None of this whimsy would be worth squat if Tarantino weren’t a filmmaker as brilliant as he is cuckoo, meaning he’s pretty darn brilliant. Whenever his coarse streak threatens to do you in, he’ll uncork an image for the ages, like the yellow leaf settling on a Basterd’s chest that uncannily mimics a Star of David. For my money, _Inglourious Basterds _stands or falls on the most ravishing shot of his career to date: a gorgeous blond in a red evening gown, her face framed and echoed by the movie billboard behind her. She’s opposite a swastika banner whose red matches her dress and whose Führer she’s planning to send to kingdom come by literally setting celluloid ablaze. To Tarantino’s cinema-crazed mind, that’s a contest between equals—and no, real life it’s not. But man, is it some kind of movie heaven.